this a very sad news. I have known Sandor since 1984 and always admired him as an exceptional scholar and human being. His moral standards were extraordinarily high and he never hesitated to speak up when he believed the cause was just, no matter how unpopular. He was also a great friend of Poland and many Polish mathematicians. T. Ledwina, T. Inglot, A. Weron, J, Koronacki, Z. Rychlik and D. Szynal expressed their grief and a sense of great loss on learning about his death.

He will be remembered and missed.

Jan Mielniczuk

Professor Laszlo KerchyDepartment of MathematicsUniversity of Szeged

Dear Professor Kerchy:

I am very saddened by the news that Sandor passed away. I will send a card and a note to his wife Zsuzsi. I viewed Sandor as a dear friend. He was a constant source of inspiration I am very proud to have published a paper with him several years ago and I am also very proud to have a paper in the special volume of your journal Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum (Szeged) dedicated to him on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Sandor strongly supported my professional development even though it is clear that I do not come close to being in his league. The entire probability/statistics community has lost a good friend and a distinguished leader. Over the past year I showed many of my colleagues the article by Sandor describing his experiences in the the U.S.S.R. when he went there in the 1970's to work with Professor Skorokhod. All who read it were deeply impressed.

Colleagues and friends of the Department of Mathematics, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland, have learned with deepest sorrow of the death of Professor Sandor Csorgo - a great scientist and a wonderful man, who has served your institution faithfully for many years.

We wish to extend to you our sincere sympathy knowing the sorrow you must feel at the loss of such an eminent scientist.

Please convey also our sincere condolences to his family,

Yours sincerely, Zdzislaw Rychlik Eligiusz Zlotkiewicz

Dear Laszlo,

It was with considerable sadness that I learned, last weekend, of Sandor's death. I greatly admire his research, and I treasure the experiences we shared in the early 1980s, when he visited Australia for a period of about six weeks. (I think it was in mid 1980 or 1981.) On one occasion my wife and I drove him to Sydney for a weekend, staying overnight with my father, south of Sydney. We went to the zoo on Saturday, and I remember that it was a lovely, pleasantly cool sunny day. To reach the zoo from the south side of Sydney harbour we caught a ferry, and Sandor enjoyed the ride.

From the ferry wharf we took a bus to the zoo's gates. There, one of the first attractions was the reptile house. I'm far from being an enthusiast for snakes, but I wasn't aware until that point that Sandor was even more concerned about them than I. We could not persuade him to enter that part of the zoo. My father enjoyed Sandor's company, and years later he would ask how Sandor was getting on.

Sandor was the consummate professional, and carefully collected all the reprints and preprints he acquired during his visit to Australia. When it came time to leave he decided that the papers were too valuable to entrust to airline baggage handlers, and that they would have to travel in the cabin with him. So the papers were carefully stacked in a rather large carry-on bag, which he kept with him during check-in procedures at Canberra airport. However, when he walked towards the departure gate, one Qantas's ground staff noticed the sharp angle at which he was leaning, laden down by the very heavy weight on one of his shoulders. She approached him, and tried lift the bag herself; she couldn't. So she persuaded him to check the bag. It arrived safely back in Hungary.

I want to extend my warm regards to Sandor's family, who have the most difficult burden to bear at this time. His colleagues, who like me admire his professional achievements, also greatly value his warmth, sincerity and integrity. Therefore we can particularly appreciate the difficult time that his family is enduring. We can all draw strength from the fondness and happy memories that all those who knew him, around the world, are reliving at this time.

Kind regards

Peter Hall

I wrote three papers with Sandor during his time at the University of Michigan. This was at an early stage in my career and I learned a great deal from him about the process of research. Sandor was a kind and generous man and I am very grateful to him for his support. He was also a great friend colleague and I have many fond memories of working with him at Michigan. Some small recollections:

- Sandor wrote his papers in plain TeX. He was very meticulous in his preparation of articles and spent much time in making sure that the appearance of the paper was exactly right.

- Sandor never drove a car in Michigan. He liked American football and the New Yorker magazine. He didn't like barbers - he had his hair cut very short once a year every spring. You could tell the time of year by the length of his hair.

- Sandor was very good at talking. It was always interesting conversation but it was a mistake to go see him if you were in a hurry.

Julian FarawayUniversity of BathEngland

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the Department of Probability and Statistics at the Insitute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, we express our sincere condolences for the untimely death of Professor Sandor Csorgo. We know him as a famous mathematician and remember his excellent series of lectures delivered during a Summer School on Probability and Statistics held in Varna in 1987. We understand that his death is great loss to your institution and to the whole mathematical community.

Yours sincerely,

Nickolay Yanev, ChairElisaveta PanchevaLjuben Mutafchiev

Colleagues from the Department of Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics of the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Ukraine were very sorry to hear of the irretrievable loss of the great mathematician Sandor Csorgo. He remains in our memory as a very nice person as he has always been, since our acquaintance in Kyiv, where he had been studied in Kyiv University under supervision of A.Skorohod. Please accept our most heartfelt and sincerest condolences.

Yuliya Mishura, the Head of the Department of Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics,the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Ukraine

Dear Professor Kerchy,

We are distressed by the sad news from Szeged - Sandor Csorgo's untime death. He did his research in stochastics during1972-75 in Kyiv under Professor Skorokhod's scientific advision and we had many opportunities to contact him at that remote time. Later on we met him in many conferences on Probability Theory, listened to his talks in this domain, contacted to him in many aspects of human life. In 2005 he sent us his bright and talanted written reminiscence about his entering the postgraduate position at Kyiv University to be published in the booklet devoted to the jubilee of Anatolii Skorokhod ("Meeting a Free Man: a Snapshot of A.V. Skorokhod").

We shall remember him and think of him cordially and with sorrow that we shall not have a chance to contact him anymore...

It is with a very heavy heart that I received the news of the untimely death of my good friend Dr. SĂĄndor CsĂśrgĹ. I am glad to have met and had known SĂĄndor for 36 years. SĂĄndor CsĂśrgĹ came to Kiev, Ukraine in 1972. He entered Kiev State University post-graduate program in Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics. I was his advisor. In 1975 he defended his dissertation and returned to Hungary. However our communication continued. SĂĄndor attended scientific conferences held in former Soviet Union. Later he came to United States of America where he worked as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, so we met again. I have enjoyed our meetings very much. Later SĂĄndor returned to Hungary. I will sorely miss SĂĄndor as will many of us who knew him. I would like to express my deepest and most sincere condolences to SĂĄndor’s family and to all Hungarian mathematical science. SĂĄndor CsĂśrgĹ passed away, but he lives in our thoughts, ever and ever, and in our hearts. May he rest in peace.

Anatoli SkorokhodDear LĂĄszlĂł,

I am deeply saddened to hear the news that we miss a great scholar:
Professor Sandor CsĂśrgĹ. SĂĄndor had been my mentor since I went to
University of Michigan for my Ph. D. study in 1997. For the past 12
years, SĂĄndor is always the source of encouragement and inspiration for
my academic and personal life. SĂĄndor basically taught me everything:
from TeX and LaTeX to the empirical processes and strong approximation
theory.

It is very regrettable that I was not able to visit SĂĄndor, since the
Chinese Communist Regine refused to renew my passport because I am
practicing Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that the Chinese Communist
Regine is persecuting. Last June SĂĄndor wrote to me and shared me with
his earlier stories. I learnt a man with great
integrity.

I am very proud that I have a great mentor. I extend my warm regards to SĂĄndor's family.

I will miss Sandor greatly, as will my
wife and three daughters, who got to know him when Sandor, with his
family, spent some time in Chapel Hill. For me, it has been nearly two
decades of professional, collegial, and personal relationship.

While I greatly value my professional activity with Sandor, I shall
continue to remember and value the personal contact with his family:
his wife, Zsuzsi, and his daughter and son, little Zsuzsi and Balint,
respectively. The hundreds of email messages that I have received from
Sandor over the years are richly sprinkled with comments from Sandor
about his family members. He was very proud of them, and shared this
part of his life with his colleagues.

In a personal note to me, his wife Zsuzsi wrote, "He was full of life
and hope up until the last day." Indeed, that was the way he lived his
life -- every day!

Gordon Simons

I would like to add my comments, in the sad passing of Sandor....

I had the great pleasure in knowing Sandor Csorgo. It was an honor to work in the same area of mathematics, even though my work couldn't compare to his. I took immense pride in showing
everyone I could, his joint paper with Gordon Simons in which they
cited several of mine. We both shared a fascination with the St.
Petersburg Game. I was trying to push Sandor into organizing a
conference, hopefully in St. Petersburg on the three-hundredth
anniversary of its origin. Now, if there is such a conference it won't
be the same without Sandor. I will miss him.

My friendship with SĂĄndor arrived at a crucial period in my life as if
by an act of God. He and his wife, Zsuzsi, were extraordinarily kind
and welcoming to me and my former wife when we came to Szeged in the
summer of 1983 and stayed for six months. My close collaboration with
SĂĄndor began then and it fundamentally changed both of our mathematical
lives.

During that stay, while working also with his brother MiklĂłs and his
student Lajos HorvĂĄth, we came up with a weighted approximation to the
uniform empirical and quantile processes by a sequence of Brownian
bridges, which has since proved to have wide ranging applications in
mathematical statistics and classical probability. SĂĄndor told me that
in recent years he had begun to refer to it in his lectures as the
Szeged Approximation.

SĂĄndor and I first met at a conference in VeszprĂŠm in 1982. I visited
him in Szeged on 6 separate occasions: 1983-84, 1985, 1986, 1989
supported by a Fulbright Grant, 2005 and finally in June 2007 to
participate in his 60th birthday conference. I spent at least 10 months
total working with him in Hungary. We also were together at numerous
conference, workshop and university venues in Europe and North America:
Szeged, Debrecen and Pecs, Hungary; Berlin, Munich and Oberwolfach,
Germany; Bad Tatzmannsdorf and Vienna, Austria; Paris, France; Leiden,
Netherlands; Leuven, Belgium; Vilnius, Lithuania; Ottawa, On; Newark,
DE, Boston, MA, Baltimore, MD, and Chapel Hill, NC.

In the 10 year period from 1985 to 1994 we published 19 joint papers.
Our collaboration placed us both firmly on the mathematical
statistics/probability landscape in Europe.

My friendship with SĂĄndor greatly enriched my life. Among other
important lessons, he taught me the civilization of mathematics and the
art of writing research papers.

SĂĄndor was an academic of the kind that one does not encounter often in
the United States. He conducted himself as a standard bearer and keeper
of high culture. For instance, very early on in our friendship he
introduced me to the wealth of Hungarian history, music, literature and
art. I believe that one of the main motives behind his decision to give
up a highly paid professorship in the USA and return to Szeged was that
he felt that his proper place was in Europe and his duty was to
contribute to the future of Hungary-not only mathematical.

I was grateful to be able to join those many others that met in Szeged
to pay their respects to SĂĄndor’s memory at his funeral. His departure
leaves an immense gap in my life.

With kind regards, David MasonDear Professor Kerchy,

Even though we all knew that SĂĄndor’s chances of recovery were
diminishing, it still came as a shock when he passed away. I have known
SĂĄndor for over 25 years and we spent time together in many different
places in the world. We both liked a good chat, so when we spent a
semester in Chapel Hill in adjoining offices, most problems of this
world got thoroughly discussed. SĂĄndor had a great sense of humor, but
he would be serious when serious matters were concerned. He was a
mathematician with excellent taste, and also a cultured person. He was
a great help in publishing the Annals of Statistics in the late
nineteen eighties. I am proud to have known this charming and wise
man, and saddened that he is no longer with us.

Sincerely,

Willem van Zwet
Leiden, the NetherlandsI am very sad to learn today from David Mason that Sandor Csorgo has
left us. I think of him as the charming young guy who visited us at UBC
in Vancouver, it must have been in the '70's. I picked him up at the
airport leaving my car in a very temporary metered spot. He insisted in
putting on his sweater before leaving the terminal, thinking Vancouver
was cold. Well, I got a parking ticket because of those few minutes,
and I was not very pleased. But Sandor was a lively and interesting
visitor. Later he was a big contributor of results at meetings of the
stochastics bunch in Canada. It is hard to believe that this wonderful
young probabilist is gone so soon.

Cindy Greenwood

Dear Professor Kerchy,

I am very sadened by the death of Professor Sandor
Csorgo. He was both a wonderful mathematician and human being. I met him
at the MSRI at Berkeley. I will never forget his
friendly, energetic personality. I am very sorry to hear about his untimely
death. I will miss him. He was an outstanding mathematician and a great
colleague.

With deep sorrow and sadness I learned about Sandor Csorgo's recent and
untimely death. Although I had heard that he was suffering from a
serious illness, I was shocked to hear that he passed away so soon. I
got to know Sandor via his brother Miklos, with whom I spent a postdoc
year at Carleton University, Ottawa. The first time I met Sandor was at
the 1982 Vezprem conference on "Limit Theorems in Probability and
Statistics", where he not only impressed me by his simultaneous
translation of Skorokhod's invited lecture from Russian into English,
by also by his great personality and deep knowledge of probability and
statistics in a very broad sense. We definitely lost a great scientist
and a good friend. I feel deeply sorrow for his family, his wife Zsuzsi
and his children Zsuzsa and Balint, and also for Miklos and his family.
I am sure that Sandor will remain with us, in his comprehensive
scientific work and in our vivid memories.

Sincerely,
Josef SteinebachDear Professor Kerchy,

I am very sad about the death of SĂĄndor CsĂśrgĂś. I have known him for
almost 20 years. He helped me a lot when I started out my career by
writing numerous letters of support for me. It was always stimulating
to meet him at conferences and I benefitted a lot from his exceptional
memory by getting references etc Even if one did not speak about
mathematics with him, one could learn a lot from him about history,
literature and even sport. He told us many interesting stories like
the one when he was travelling in the Paris metro and a pillow was
stolen which was supposed to be the present for his host. I am glad
that I was able to attend the conference last year in Szeged which was
in honor of his 60th birthday. Even though he already knew about his
illness at that time, he was an exceptional host during that conference.

As many other colleagues have expressed, we will remember him as an
excellent mathematician and a most pleasant person.

Uwe Einmahl, Free University of Brussels, Belgium

Dear Professor Kerchy,

I am very sad to learn about Sandor's serious illness and his untimely death.

I first met Sandor in the spring of 1984 at Oberwolfach. We have been
in professional contact ever since. What means more to me than having
had the opportunity to
write papers with such an eminent mathematician is to have known such a
truly outstanding person.

I will never forget my visits to Szeged in the late eighties when
Sandor showed me the treasures of your library, among them the
beautifully handwritten lecture notes of Alfred Haar.

When Sandor came to Giessen in the middle of the nineties he put
certain things into perspective here during a hallway conversation by
telling one of the local big shots, "The problem with you German
professors is that you think that you are all
little Hilberts, and none of you really is." I don't think I ever
enjoyed a professional conversation more than that one.

The best epitaph I know is this quotation from Hamlet, "He was a man,
take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again". It
surely applies to Sandor.

Sincerely yours,

Erich Haeusler

I am shocked by the sad news about our colleague
SĂĄndor CsĂśrgĹ and I would like to express my sincere condolences
to his wife and children. SĂĄndor an I have about the same age and
we knew each other from the beginning of our careers. Our first
meeting must have been in 1977 in the former Soviet Union at the occasion of
the Second Vilnius Conference. Since then we were always delighted to
see each other again at numerous conferences all over Europe and
also in the US. His work on empirical processes, quantile
processes, censored data still has a great influence on my own work and I have
always admired him for his mathematical talent and his open mind and
humor in sharing this with me and so many other colleagues. A truly great
personality!

NoĂŤl Veraverbeke

Universiteit Hasselt, Belgium

It was with great sadness that I learned that SĂĄndor CsĂśrgĹ has passed
away. I remember the happy days SĂĄndor spent at Carleton University.
It was a great privilege to get to know him and experience at first
hand his warm and energetic personality and wonderful lectures. SĂĄndor
made deep and important contributions to probability and statistics
which have inspired many people around the world. It is tragic that
his life was cut short at such a young age. My deep condolences to his
family and colleagues.

Donald Dawson
Carleton University

Kedves MiklĂłs!

I have just been informed of the most terrible news. It is on such
occasions I fully realize how precious a friend is, and how poor the
words can be to express what one feels.

I remember meeting SĂĄndor for the first time in Ottawa in 1997 (at
ICAMPS'97), where we had some long discussions about whether Paul LĂŠvy
was as an important mathematician as Kolmogorov - we did not share the
same opinion at that time. Later on, we met on many occasions, mostly
in Hungary. At a conference in Eger (it was in 2001 I believe) of which
SĂĄndor was in the organizing committee, we celebrated his election as
an academician. On the same occasion, I discovered with surprise that
SĂĄndor's papers were cited by people from all kinds of horizons, and
not even necessarily within the mathematical community. I will always
keep in mind of the time when Hungary joined the European Community: it
was on May 1st 2004, accompanied with a message by SĂĄndor reciting
Schiller's Ode to Joy. He will be missed and remembered by all of us
who have had the chance of knowing him.

With best wishes,Zhan Shi

Dear MiklĂłs,

this is the saddest news. Indeed, I have not known yet about this.
Please take my deep feelings of regret and feeling with you. SĂĄndor
was a wonderful colleague, a great scientist and a dear and sincere
friend. I will definitely miss him, not only for his deep and always
fair reports he has written as AE of METRIKA.

Ursula Gather

Dear Professor Kerchy,

it is with great sadness that I learnt that Professor SĂĄndor
CsĂśrgĹ has passed away. SĂĄndor was one of the great probabilists and
mathematical statisticians of our time; his untimely death is a
terrible loss to the mathematical community in Hungary, and indeed in
the entire world.

I met SĂĄndor for the first time in 1982 during the Veszprem
conference, and I still vividly remember his brilliant performance as
translator of Professor Skorohod's talk. Since that time, we have met
at many conferences all over the world. SĂĄndor's talks were highlights
of every meeting, both for his deep mathematical insight as well as for
his entertaining way of communication.

SĂĄndor and I shared a special interest in the life and work of Daniel
Bernoulli (1700 - 1782). SĂĄndor's interest arose through his scholarly
work on the St. Petersburg problem, to which Daniel Bernoulli had
contributed in the early 18th century. My interest was local history,
as Daniel Bernoulli was born in the town of Groningen, where I lived
for many years. SĂĄndor enjoyed my activities as lobbyist for a
plaquette on Bernoulli's birthplace, which was finally unveiled in the
year 2000 on the occasion of Daniel's 300th birthday.

I greatly admired the mathematical creativity and power of SĂĄndor
CsĂśrgĹ. But at least as much as for that, I will always remember
SĂĄndor for his stimulating enthusiasm, his gentle sense of humor, his
positive attitude towards the work of others and for his most generous
support for younger colleagues.

Sincerely yours,
Herold Dehling

Dear MiklĂłs,

I have only just now found out - from the ISI Newsletter - that SĂĄndor
passed away in February, and I am extremely sad to hear it. It seems
like no time since the Gini-Lorenz conference in September 2006, and he
seemed well then; I was very glad to talk with him at some length and
will treasure that memory (I'm very grateful to you for inviting me).
SĂĄndor was nearly four years younger than me and was far too young to
leave this world. It's a very great shame, as he had so much more to
give. Our main point of contact was common interest in the Lorenz-Gini
area. He was always very kind about my own contribution there, and I
was glad to have provided some sort of impetus for his extensive and
authoritative work in that direction. Though younger, SĂĄndor was a
role model to me in that his enthusiasm, energy, enjoyment and
commitment were all qualities I felt impelled by his example to
emulate. During the Carleton meeting I asked him about growing up in
Hungary in what was one of the most repressive of the Soviet satellite
regimes, and I heard from him a partial account of what it was like; it's clear he overcame huge obstacles.

You will have lost a younger brother whom you would have expected to
outlive you, given the age gap, so his passing must leave a huge gap,
and I extend my sympathy to you and to others in the family.

My very best wishes,Charles M. Goldie.

Dear MiklĂłs,

I followed the last stages of your brother's illness and learned of his untimely death. The truncation of such a rich and intense life filled me with sorrow. And more because he was a dear friend and a very good probabilist.

We had corresponded on probability issues, had had very good times smoking cigars together and had refereed each others papers. We had talked about math, life, politics. I will always remember him.

Somehow, I neglected sending you my condolences, and I wish to redress this neglect with this email. I accompany you in your sorrow and sense of loss.

Kind regards,

Evarist GinĂŠ

Dear Zsuzsi,

Please accept my sincere condolences. My thoughts are with you and with
SĂĄndor. I will always remember him, and I will remember in particular
the last time I saw him (and first time I saw you) at Oberwolfach three
or four years ago. He was a very good person, full of life, and a very
good probabilist. He will be missed by the whole probability community.

Truly yours,

Evarist GinĂŠ

Dear Professor KĂŠrchy,

Members of the University of Michigan community and former students
remember Professor CsĂśrgĹ as being among the finest of scholars,
educators, and friends. He set a great example and a high standard
toward which we all aspired. We were inspired by the depth of
Professor CsĂśrgĹ's
passion, impressed by the breadth of his knowledge, and touched by the
humanity of his friendship. Always rigorous, always intense, and
always patient, Professor CsĂśrgĹ influenced and contributed
tremendously to our education and development. For me, he was the best
teacher that I ever had.

My condolences go out to Professor CsĂśrgĹ's family and friends. The world has lost a great man.

We were former students in the
University of Michigan and Professor CsĂśrgĹ was our teach on
Probability and Measures. Even the material of this class is
challenging, Prof. CsĂśrgĹ made the class scripts into music notes and
he played the song for us. He did not only talk about mathematics, but
also combined his knowledge in philosophy and literature to tell
stories for each theorem. After many time of relocation and so many
years of working in applied fields, we carefully preserved Prof.
CsĂśrgĹ's extremely elegant hand written notes. It reminds us the days
that we enjoyed so much in the world of probability.

Probability is only one of the things
Prof. CsĂśrgĹ cared about. He cared about his student's feeling and
never reserved his energy in helping out in their difficult times. When
Hong was sick for a period of time, he recorded his lecture using a
mini-cassette for her and also added additional comments in his notes
to help her. His decency as a professional and a human being is a
legacy to us and encouraged us to get things done right.

This is a late note, but we don't think
Prof. CsĂśrgĹ would mind as the time we are late for homework,
especially knowing this will set peace in our mind.